Friday, January 23, 2009
Mr. Pon
Mr. Pon is an affable man. He stands at about 5’4’’ tall, but he seems shorter because of the way his head bends forward. His round jaw droops down when relaxed, and the dimple on his chin reveals a small growth of hair (This is for good luck). His skin is dark, but not as black as a farmer. His handshake is limp and clammy, but he means well by it. It is not his custom. Mr. Pon was one of the first people who I met in the town of Anchor because he is one of the few people who speak English. During the first few weeks of service, I made a point to stop and talk to him whenever I happened to pass through the market.
Whenever I said hello to him, he would instantly reply and pull up a plastic chair for me to sit down in. He would pepper me with questions about where I come from, what kind of work I was doing in the school, and why on earth I gave up a comfortable life in the US for one of hardship in Cambodia. In return, he told me about how he had come to live and work in the tiny town nearly twenty years ago as math teacher at the secondary school. I listened to the rich tapestry of stories about his that he told me, which revealed the history of Cambodia itself over the last thirty years. He told me his childhood memories of life under Pol Pot, the Vietnamese occupation, the war between the government and the few remaining Khmer Rouge forces, and his discovery of Christianity in 2003. These days, I go to Mr. Pon’s house on the edge of the market every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. We have an agreement that he will teach me Khmer for an hour, and that I will teach him English for an hour. It is a good system because otherwise I would have to pay for a language tutor, and introducing money into this kind of relationship would simply ruin the element of having a linguistic exchange.
Mr. Pon is a religious man. He told me the story once during a rainy afternoon of how he discovered Christianity. “Before I love Jesus,” he said, “I was a Buddhist. I did very bad things! I drink, I play cards, I go to the bars with the girls. But I was very unhappy.” The path to Christianity was first laid out before him through the medium of the radio. Sometime during the 1990’s, A Korean missionary started broadcasting sermons from the capitol in Phnom Penh. On Sunday nights, Mr. Pon would listen. He was intrigued by what the missionary had to say, and became resolved to find out more about this new and strange religion that promised salvation and absolution from a prurient past.
The history irony of this situation has not escaped me. For nearly four hundred years, missionaries from Europe have been trying to convert the indifferent Buddhist populations of Indochina with limited success. Spanish and Portugese missionaries arrived from the newly established colonies in the East Indies during the 1600’s failed to gain abundant followers, and the same can be said of the French when Cambodia was a protectorate of France. Monsignor Miche, a missionary bishop, wrote in 1861, “It is certain for anyone who has lived for some years in Cambodia that one can never obtain much success with Cambodians, unless it is through buying the freedom of debt slaves; but that method is long and costly (Osborne, 65). The fact that Korean missionaries in Cambodia have had some success in attracting converts in modern day Cambodia is somewhat ironic. However, there could be other reasons behind this. It is well known in Cambodia that South Korea is a very rich country due to the amount of water filters, televisions, cooking-ware, and television soap operas that the country produces. It would be reasonable to consider that someone drawn to a Korean missionary would be attracted to the wealth that that person represents. However, I could not say for certain that this is the case with Mr. Pon.
As time went on, my English-speaking friend began to think that becoming a Christian would resolve his unhappy state. “When I first joined my church in Siem Reap,” he says, “I said to myself ‘Wow’! I’m so happy!” The summer after he joined the church in Siem Reap, he returned to the town of Anchor to teach math and share his newfound faith. He built a small church next door to his house, and started encouraging students to follow him. However, the school director got word of it and was very angry. He removed him from his teaching position, and moved him to a position in the school office. He says that he wants to go back to teaching, but that he is afraid of the school director. I can understand that perfectly, because I myself am afraid of the school director. Mr. Pon believes that Christianity is the key to ending Cambodia’s long history of corruption in Cambodian society. He has told me that if more people were Christians in Cambodia, then there would be no corruption. I want to tell him that Christians are capable of being corrupted, but I do not want to shatter this dream of his. I would rather him discover this on his own.
When we learn English together, the choice of reading material is the New Testament of the Bible. Admittedly I am not very religious, but I did attend an Episcopalian school for some six years of my life. This means that while I may not believe in everything that the Bible says, I did sit through enough chapel services, sermons, and mandatory religion classes to at least pretend to know what I am talking about. The choice of reading is not a problem, and usually I can discuss passages in the Bible without giving myself away as an utter pontoon. To some degree, I actually enjoy it. Most ESL books are incredibly boring, so the fact that I can read and talk about devils, Romans, betrayal, and the apocalypse is actually pretty exciting. The scene itself is actually quite amusing. Picture in your mind two men sitting in the back corner of a concrete cell phone shop reading the Bible together. One is a young white foreigner, and the other is a middle aged Cambodian man. The words of the text come slowly out of my mouth as if the reading were any other text, and my pupil follows along very carefully.
Mr. Pon is a clever man, for Socrates himself would be proud of him. When we come to a phrase or a word that he does not understand, he tells me. He asks me regular questions about the grammar of the reading, with particular attention to the use of tenses, but sometimes he is curious about the meaning of the text. During a reading of the gospel of Matthew one afternoon, something in the text struck him as being rather odd. In one particular section, one reads that John the Baptist is imprisoned and that Jesus is occupied with other affairs. Upon discovering this, Mr. Pon stopped reading and asked me why Jesus did not want to help his friend. The answers that came to my head such as Jesus was busy or that God wanted Jesus elsewhere, seemed like a very poor answer to his query. I stalled for time with a great big “Uhhh,” and masked my inability to give spiritual guidance by telling him, “Well…maybe Jesus was going to go and help his friend, but then he got a sudden call on his cell phone for him to do other things.” Mr. Pon always appreciates a joke, and he laughed while squinting and clapping me on the back. I smiled as well, albeit not at the flimsiness of the joke or the slight awkwardness of the situation. What I was pleased with was Mr. Pon’s ability to question. Here was a man who had given up a large part of his culture, which has alienated him somewhat from the community, for something he believes in strongly. Yet, he was still willing to suspect any small piece of his new faith as being circumspect. I admire him for that.
Mr. Pon is my Khmer teacher. I currently use Cambodian for Beginners by Richard Gilbert to study with him for a number of reasons. For the most part, it has very good sections devoted to the grammar and proper usage of the language, which I am lacking in. Our language training sessions in Kampong were so heavily devoted to learning huge lists of vocabulary words that I found myself blurting out words without knowing how to put them together. Imagine going into a bookshop and finding a person at the checkout saying several times, “Buy book me!” That would be the English equivalent of my inchoate language skills. With Mr. Pon, I practice putting these words together so that I can use them later.
Sometimes these sessions spark cultural hints into what I should and should not be saying. I heard someone say once, “Okoon thom thom” (Thank you big big) as a kind of humorous substitute for, “Okoon chur ahhn (Thank you very much). I started saying this, and I used it once during a Khmer lesson with Mr. Pon. He laughed upon hearing me say this, and said that all the Vietnamese soldiers used to say this during the occupation. He then proceeded to tell me this story:
I have stopped using okoon thom thom completely.
Mr. Pon and I are friends, one of the few that I have in this town. Our curious friendship has grown from simply sharing the common interests of language and history, to one of debate, cultural exchange, and trust. We tell each other things that we cannot tell other people in Anchor. “I can tell you these things because you are a foreigner,” he says to me. “If I tell the people in Anchor, I am in trouble.” I take his trust very seriously. You may take this brief entry as an introduction to Mr. Pon, dear reader, but I only tell you so much. I tell my views on Cambodian society, and what it is like to be abroad and so far very far from a world of the familiar and the comfortable. I treasure even being able to have a basic conversation like this in English during the long weeks that I spend at site.
We enjoy each other’s company, and I will miss Mr. Pon when I leave the town of Anchor in a year and a half.
Whenever I said hello to him, he would instantly reply and pull up a plastic chair for me to sit down in. He would pepper me with questions about where I come from, what kind of work I was doing in the school, and why on earth I gave up a comfortable life in the US for one of hardship in Cambodia. In return, he told me about how he had come to live and work in the tiny town nearly twenty years ago as math teacher at the secondary school. I listened to the rich tapestry of stories about his that he told me, which revealed the history of Cambodia itself over the last thirty years. He told me his childhood memories of life under Pol Pot, the Vietnamese occupation, the war between the government and the few remaining Khmer Rouge forces, and his discovery of Christianity in 2003. These days, I go to Mr. Pon’s house on the edge of the market every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. We have an agreement that he will teach me Khmer for an hour, and that I will teach him English for an hour. It is a good system because otherwise I would have to pay for a language tutor, and introducing money into this kind of relationship would simply ruin the element of having a linguistic exchange.
Mr. Pon is a religious man. He told me the story once during a rainy afternoon of how he discovered Christianity. “Before I love Jesus,” he said, “I was a Buddhist. I did very bad things! I drink, I play cards, I go to the bars with the girls. But I was very unhappy.” The path to Christianity was first laid out before him through the medium of the radio. Sometime during the 1990’s, A Korean missionary started broadcasting sermons from the capitol in Phnom Penh. On Sunday nights, Mr. Pon would listen. He was intrigued by what the missionary had to say, and became resolved to find out more about this new and strange religion that promised salvation and absolution from a prurient past.
The history irony of this situation has not escaped me. For nearly four hundred years, missionaries from Europe have been trying to convert the indifferent Buddhist populations of Indochina with limited success. Spanish and Portugese missionaries arrived from the newly established colonies in the East Indies during the 1600’s failed to gain abundant followers, and the same can be said of the French when Cambodia was a protectorate of France. Monsignor Miche, a missionary bishop, wrote in 1861, “It is certain for anyone who has lived for some years in Cambodia that one can never obtain much success with Cambodians, unless it is through buying the freedom of debt slaves; but that method is long and costly (Osborne, 65). The fact that Korean missionaries in Cambodia have had some success in attracting converts in modern day Cambodia is somewhat ironic. However, there could be other reasons behind this. It is well known in Cambodia that South Korea is a very rich country due to the amount of water filters, televisions, cooking-ware, and television soap operas that the country produces. It would be reasonable to consider that someone drawn to a Korean missionary would be attracted to the wealth that that person represents. However, I could not say for certain that this is the case with Mr. Pon.
As time went on, my English-speaking friend began to think that becoming a Christian would resolve his unhappy state. “When I first joined my church in Siem Reap,” he says, “I said to myself ‘Wow’! I’m so happy!” The summer after he joined the church in Siem Reap, he returned to the town of Anchor to teach math and share his newfound faith. He built a small church next door to his house, and started encouraging students to follow him. However, the school director got word of it and was very angry. He removed him from his teaching position, and moved him to a position in the school office. He says that he wants to go back to teaching, but that he is afraid of the school director. I can understand that perfectly, because I myself am afraid of the school director. Mr. Pon believes that Christianity is the key to ending Cambodia’s long history of corruption in Cambodian society. He has told me that if more people were Christians in Cambodia, then there would be no corruption. I want to tell him that Christians are capable of being corrupted, but I do not want to shatter this dream of his. I would rather him discover this on his own.
When we learn English together, the choice of reading material is the New Testament of the Bible. Admittedly I am not very religious, but I did attend an Episcopalian school for some six years of my life. This means that while I may not believe in everything that the Bible says, I did sit through enough chapel services, sermons, and mandatory religion classes to at least pretend to know what I am talking about. The choice of reading is not a problem, and usually I can discuss passages in the Bible without giving myself away as an utter pontoon. To some degree, I actually enjoy it. Most ESL books are incredibly boring, so the fact that I can read and talk about devils, Romans, betrayal, and the apocalypse is actually pretty exciting. The scene itself is actually quite amusing. Picture in your mind two men sitting in the back corner of a concrete cell phone shop reading the Bible together. One is a young white foreigner, and the other is a middle aged Cambodian man. The words of the text come slowly out of my mouth as if the reading were any other text, and my pupil follows along very carefully.
Mr. Pon is a clever man, for Socrates himself would be proud of him. When we come to a phrase or a word that he does not understand, he tells me. He asks me regular questions about the grammar of the reading, with particular attention to the use of tenses, but sometimes he is curious about the meaning of the text. During a reading of the gospel of Matthew one afternoon, something in the text struck him as being rather odd. In one particular section, one reads that John the Baptist is imprisoned and that Jesus is occupied with other affairs. Upon discovering this, Mr. Pon stopped reading and asked me why Jesus did not want to help his friend. The answers that came to my head such as Jesus was busy or that God wanted Jesus elsewhere, seemed like a very poor answer to his query. I stalled for time with a great big “Uhhh,” and masked my inability to give spiritual guidance by telling him, “Well…maybe Jesus was going to go and help his friend, but then he got a sudden call on his cell phone for him to do other things.” Mr. Pon always appreciates a joke, and he laughed while squinting and clapping me on the back. I smiled as well, albeit not at the flimsiness of the joke or the slight awkwardness of the situation. What I was pleased with was Mr. Pon’s ability to question. Here was a man who had given up a large part of his culture, which has alienated him somewhat from the community, for something he believes in strongly. Yet, he was still willing to suspect any small piece of his new faith as being circumspect. I admire him for that.
Mr. Pon is my Khmer teacher. I currently use Cambodian for Beginners by Richard Gilbert to study with him for a number of reasons. For the most part, it has very good sections devoted to the grammar and proper usage of the language, which I am lacking in. Our language training sessions in Kampong were so heavily devoted to learning huge lists of vocabulary words that I found myself blurting out words without knowing how to put them together. Imagine going into a bookshop and finding a person at the checkout saying several times, “Buy book me!” That would be the English equivalent of my inchoate language skills. With Mr. Pon, I practice putting these words together so that I can use them later.
Sometimes these sessions spark cultural hints into what I should and should not be saying. I heard someone say once, “Okoon thom thom” (Thank you big big) as a kind of humorous substitute for, “Okoon chur ahhn (Thank you very much). I started saying this, and I used it once during a Khmer lesson with Mr. Pon. He laughed upon hearing me say this, and said that all the Vietnamese soldiers used to say this during the occupation. He then proceeded to tell me this story:
Once when I was a boy, a Vietnamese soldier killed himself in our town. He missed his family a lot when he came to Cambodia. One night he took his gun and went like this (Mr. Pon uses gestures and motion. He indicates that the soldier propped his rifle up with the butt on the ground and the barrel in his mouth, and used his toe to press down on the trigger. He pats his head to show where the massive hole in the top of his head would have been). My friend and I discovered him on the way to school the next day.
I have stopped using okoon thom thom completely.
Mr. Pon and I are friends, one of the few that I have in this town. Our curious friendship has grown from simply sharing the common interests of language and history, to one of debate, cultural exchange, and trust. We tell each other things that we cannot tell other people in Anchor. “I can tell you these things because you are a foreigner,” he says to me. “If I tell the people in Anchor, I am in trouble.” I take his trust very seriously. You may take this brief entry as an introduction to Mr. Pon, dear reader, but I only tell you so much. I tell my views on Cambodian society, and what it is like to be abroad and so far very far from a world of the familiar and the comfortable. I treasure even being able to have a basic conversation like this in English during the long weeks that I spend at site.
We enjoy each other’s company, and I will miss Mr. Pon when I leave the town of Anchor in a year and a half.
For All the Ones We've Lost
It is funny thing when people in our situation decide to leave this place. I can only imagine what the first group of volunteers is going through right now as they are preparing to leave this country. As they abandoned their American selves two years ago, so must they do the same for the life they have made here. Reverse culture shock can quite alarming, and I have heard the process of adjusting to life in the US can be a tough process. From all the stories I have heard, going home is somewhat euphoric at first at simply being reunited with friends and family again. Then about a month or two afterwards, you begin to have problems you would not ordinarily have. One story that sticks out in my mind is that of a young woman who served in sub-Saharan Africa. She went to a supermarket with one of her friends, and at the last minute the friend asked her to run back and get some raisin bran. The former volunteer came back frustrated at the fact that there were fifty different kinds of raisin bran, and that she had no idea which one to pick. It may seem like a minor inconvenience to you, dear reader, but the poor girl was nearly in tears. The shock of returning to a former life once forgotten can be quite a shock in all the ways you would not expect. I wish all the K1’s all the best of luck back in the world, if they happen to be reading this.
Of course, not everyone makes it the entire two years. Of the thirty-seven volunteers that accepted the invitation to serve in Cambodia, thirty-two of us still remain. One has to remember that despite the quasi-military aspects of the organization such as the use of acronyms, the “officer” component in the titles of the staff, the two-year commitment, and the fact that “Corps” is part of its title, joining the Peace Corps is not like joining the army. You may terminate your service at any time, and no action can be taken against you for doing so. People leave more often than you would think. Sometimes the initial shock of getting off the plane in a very distant country is enough to make someone really think about what they are doing.
When someone leaves, the feelings about this person are usually mixed. You cannot really blame them for wanting to go home because the fact of the matter is that this is a really hard job. Quite frankly, there is a good reason why there are not a lot of people who could do what we are doing. It can be frustrating, lonely, boring, and stressful at times, and you cannot really blame someone for not wanting to put up with that for years on end. I will admit myself that during really bad days or weeks, I catch myself daydreaming of wearing tweed jackets and machine-washed clothing, eating gigantic burritos stuffed with guacamole, and playing chamber music with my former music teachers on a beautiful fall day in New England. Of course, a person’s reasons for going back are probably less trivial than this.
Of course, the opposite feelings of this are always there. You want them to stay because if you know them well enough, there’s a good enough chance that the person is your friend. Then you do not want them to leave. Ultimately, your friend has to do what is right for them. If going home to America is what they need to do, you can only be supportive.
When a person leaves during training, a curious sensation sweeps through the group of volunteers. Initially, the person who left is talked about. It is hard not to, because the person who you ate a meal with or shared a room with is no longer there. People start thinking about what would happen to them if they left, what would happen that would be so bad that would make them leave, or even who is going to leave next. There is a genuine feeling of uncertainty, but after a few days it is no longer there. Having one less person in the group becomes part of the daily adjustment you have to make, and the matter is largely put to rest. They are seldom talked about again.
When someone leaves now, it is a bit different. The group that was once cohesive is now independently working at their sites, and consumed with the affairs that happen there. The feelings that are aroused when one hears of a person’s departure can only be described as, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
I suppose that it is all that can be expected.
Of course, not everyone makes it the entire two years. Of the thirty-seven volunteers that accepted the invitation to serve in Cambodia, thirty-two of us still remain. One has to remember that despite the quasi-military aspects of the organization such as the use of acronyms, the “officer” component in the titles of the staff, the two-year commitment, and the fact that “Corps” is part of its title, joining the Peace Corps is not like joining the army. You may terminate your service at any time, and no action can be taken against you for doing so. People leave more often than you would think. Sometimes the initial shock of getting off the plane in a very distant country is enough to make someone really think about what they are doing.
When someone leaves, the feelings about this person are usually mixed. You cannot really blame them for wanting to go home because the fact of the matter is that this is a really hard job. Quite frankly, there is a good reason why there are not a lot of people who could do what we are doing. It can be frustrating, lonely, boring, and stressful at times, and you cannot really blame someone for not wanting to put up with that for years on end. I will admit myself that during really bad days or weeks, I catch myself daydreaming of wearing tweed jackets and machine-washed clothing, eating gigantic burritos stuffed with guacamole, and playing chamber music with my former music teachers on a beautiful fall day in New England. Of course, a person’s reasons for going back are probably less trivial than this.
Of course, the opposite feelings of this are always there. You want them to stay because if you know them well enough, there’s a good enough chance that the person is your friend. Then you do not want them to leave. Ultimately, your friend has to do what is right for them. If going home to America is what they need to do, you can only be supportive.
When a person leaves during training, a curious sensation sweeps through the group of volunteers. Initially, the person who left is talked about. It is hard not to, because the person who you ate a meal with or shared a room with is no longer there. People start thinking about what would happen to them if they left, what would happen that would be so bad that would make them leave, or even who is going to leave next. There is a genuine feeling of uncertainty, but after a few days it is no longer there. Having one less person in the group becomes part of the daily adjustment you have to make, and the matter is largely put to rest. They are seldom talked about again.
When someone leaves now, it is a bit different. The group that was once cohesive is now independently working at their sites, and consumed with the affairs that happen there. The feelings that are aroused when one hears of a person’s departure can only be described as, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
I suppose that it is all that can be expected.
On Being French
The people here say that I’m French
I say I am not
They tell me I have big blue eyes
Sun colored hair, the lot.
They say, “You’re not one of us!
No one here looks that way.
Your description fits a word we have
And so we say you’re French.”
I tell them this is still not true
And that, “I’m American.”
They ask me, “What’s the difference?”
And why I’ve named this land
“Americans come from America,” I say,
“And French people come from France.
Americans say, “Yes!” “Hello!”
And French people say, “C’est dommage…”
A loquacious look creeps upon their face
And suddenly they exclaim
“Oh I understand, perfectly.
This Frenchman’s American!”
I say I am not
They tell me I have big blue eyes
Sun colored hair, the lot.
They say, “You’re not one of us!
No one here looks that way.
Your description fits a word we have
And so we say you’re French.”
I tell them this is still not true
And that, “I’m American.”
They ask me, “What’s the difference?”
And why I’ve named this land
“Americans come from America,” I say,
“And French people come from France.
Americans say, “Yes!” “Hello!”
And French people say, “C’est dommage…”
A loquacious look creeps upon their face
And suddenly they exclaim
“Oh I understand, perfectly.
This Frenchman’s American!”
The Boys Who Sit At the Back of the Class And Do Not Smile
The boys at the back of the class who do not smile arrange themselves in clumps, clods stuck together and
afraid to break away from eachother’s
pockets.They have sat congealed to one another through
Hours upon hours of lecture, their eyes glazed, puffedand almost bovine. Jaws their droopy and
full of the wasted hours spent
[-ing] copying
listening
repeating.
[-ing] copying
listening
repeating.
(Barely) thinking.
The boys at the back of the class who do not smile neverraise their hand. Call on them to speak No speak foreign.
Cell phone games and whispers ease
The ticking time to where
Soccer is played
“Jazz June” the time now
It will all end in tears
It will all end in tears
Friday, January 9, 2009
The Seamless Passage of Time
For I have known them all already, known them all-
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
-T.S. Eliot
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
The arrival of 2009 in rural Cambodia was an uncelebrated and unrecognized occasion. There were no parties, fireworks, or celebrations of any kind to mark the change in time. I raised the subject of the dying year on New Years Eve, and the response from most Cambodians was merely a shrug and a smile. I went to sleep that evening at nine o’clock to the sound of some drinking establishment’s supersonic vibrations, and woke up early the next morning to find that the date on my cell phone had changed. The only hint that something was different came from the fact that I had the day off from teaching. In search of doing something special for the holiday, I proposed having brunch to the volunteer married couple in the town closest to me. I caught a taxi early the next morning into their town some 40 kilometers away, and drove across the veel s’rai ma roy (place of a hundred fields). In the cab of an old pickup truck, I was crammed next to at least six other people who smelled of various odors. The red earth road cut straight across a sea of green, and the dust billowed up furiously behind us. I arrived at the next town in time to pick up a few items from the local market, and walked to my friends’ home. With supplies from our local markets and the Siem Reap supermarkets, the three of us managed to put together a brunch of pancakes, a pineapple, banana, and watermelon fruit salad, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs. In a moment that is very rare in Cambodia, not a single grain of rice touched our plates. We ate on their stone patio underneath a coconut tree and shared stories of our recent developments at site. The conversation was carried along by an excitable tone that only comes when you have not been able to have a fluent conversation in your native language for a long time. It was a good time.
A curious sensation crept up slowly on me later that day, and it had to do with the passage of time. How I spent New Years was no different from how the other American holidays had passed in Cambodia, but somehow this particular one was different. Labor day had passed during training without being noticed, as did Columbus Day and Halloween. I taught two classes on Thanksgiving, and did the same on Christmas. Text messages passed between volunteers read, “You know, if I close my eyes and try really hard, this salty dried fish I’m eating sort of tastes like turkey. Happy Thanksgiving!” or “I’m dreaming of a very green Christmas,” when the occasion was upon us. Yet without the recognition of these holidays to punctuate the final months of the year, the New Year was unnoticeable as a submerged water buffalo in a deep canal. It seemed as if there was no clear reason why the date had to change. Cambodians celebrate the New Year in April, and I have to wonder if their feelings on the Gregorian calendar resemble mine at the present moment. Yet, this uncelebrated marker in time seems to be in connection with a larger cultural element.
Time passes very differently in the land of lotus flower. In the west, time is separated and categorized into different spaces. We have quarters, semesters, seasons, daylight savings time, and familiar holidays to mark the different stages of the year. Over here, time is much harder to measure. To begin with, the weather remains the same from day to day, with little discernible difference other than the presence of rain. The sun rises at six every morning, and sets at six every evening. Thus, it is hard to measure time through its subtle changes or any other physical entity. In lieu of the familiar markers of time, there is instead a kind of continuous lull that persists as the days on the calendar go by.
Thus, it seems that the passage of time is not an important part of life for most Cambodians. The best example of this can be found in the fact that not even one’s own birthday is cause for celebration. Many of the older people, as well as those born during the time of the Khmer Rouge, do not even know when their birthday is or even what year they were born. They live their entire lives not knowing how old they are. Take a moment to think about that last sentence for a moment. Imagine not knowing how old you are as you go about the different stages of life. My working theory on why this is so has to do with Theravada Buddhism. This local sect of the eastern religion teaches that displays of strong, impassioned emotions are not acceptable, and that a calm disposition must be taken towards life at all times. Thus, the frenzy of the northern European Protestant work ethic, which dictates the compartmentalization of time, could never be accepted here. Thus, the numbering of dates, figures, ages, and other such numerical data about a person is completely malarkey in the eyes of the Khmer.
In its place is a feeling that could be described as “eternal mid-August at the beach.” If Odysseus had been an Asiatic, he would have found the land of the lotus-eaters in central Indochina. When walking down the main street or into the market in the middle of the afternoon, one can see nearly the whole population of Anchor strung up in hammocks or slumped over a table somewhere. A trip to the wat will reveal that most of the monks there are passed out on the floor beneath their giant, golden, smiling Buddha. If I want coffee in the afternoon at a nearby cafe after teaching a lesson, I continually have to wake up the sleeping waitress from her nap in the hammock to place my order. Teachers at the school will skip class if they feel tired, want to play soccer, or are, most regrettably, drunk.
In all fairness, I can see why the work ethic is much different from the west’s or even other parts of Asia. Between the heat, the rain, and the lack of protein in the diet, simply living in this country is considerably exhausting. On some days, a simple morning’s walk down to the market can be reason enough to want to take a nap in the hammock. After living here for nearly six months already, I can already see why the French failed to make a financially successful protectorate out of Cambodia. It is simply too damn hot to get anything done.
Nonetheless, it is into this lull that I step forward in 2009. Every 18th day of the current month, I make a mental note to myself that it is another month since I left my home. Come the 18th of this month, it will will have been six months. Its my own way of keeping time in a world that is "timeless." Prufrock had his coffee spoons, I have my 18ths.
Happy New Year To All!
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